Saturday, June 16, 2007

Ruth Graham Dies

I don't expect this story to appear at Pandagon or Echidne of the Snakes, but it has a feminist angle regardless of whether the supposed feminists notice it or not.

The headlines read:

Billy Graham’s Wife Ruth Dies

But as Terry Mattingly at Get Religion writes, that headline misses so much of who Ruth Graham was and what her influence on her famous husband was.
Anyone who has ever studied the life and career of the world’s most famous evangelist knows that Ruth Bell Graham was much more than his wife or even, as the later headlines are now saying, his soul mate.

But soul mate doesn’t do her justice, either.

Ruth Bell Graham was nothing less, in my opinion, than the X-factor in her husband’s life, the source of that strange sense of otherness that, when blended with Billy Graham’s essential humanity and North Carolina sense of grace, has always added a note of mystery to his career. His natural instinct was to get along with people. Her natural instinct, at crucial times, was to push back against the powerful people who wanted to own her man, body and soul.

Ruth was the other voice in his head that was always hard to explain, in large part because she — throughout her long and amazing life — stayed quietly inside their stunning but surprisingly simple home in the North Carolina mountains, the home that she dreamed up and defended like a lioness. But it is safe to assume that her voice was strong and articulate, inside those old log-cabin walls (built out of materials gathered from several old abandoned cabins in that neck of the woods).

Billy Graham always said Ruth was much smarter than he was. And he knew it. In that “ah, shucks” modest way of his, he kept telling people that she was the brains in the operation. In this case, I don’t think he was joking.

Mattingly goes on to describe Ruth Graham as a strong, determined woman who clung to her Presbyterianism long after her husband emerged as a Southern Baptist evangelical preacher to the world.

Read the rest of Mattingly's piece as well as the links in it to learn more about this fascinating woman.